My grandmother, Joan Ware, who has died aged 99, was a speech and drama teacher who in later life embarked on an adventurous second career as a grandma model and lookalike for Queen Victoria.
Joan was born in Brixton, south London, younger daughter of Lilian (nee Fuller) and Daniel Digby. The family moved in the 1920s to Streatham, where Joan lived until nearly the end of her life. At an amateur dramatic club at Grafton Square church in Clapham Old Town, Joan met Harold Ware. They were married in 1941, and their only child, Nigel, my father, was born in 1947.
During the second world war, Joan started teaching speech and drama at various adult education institutes, and she continued to do so for 40 years. In addition, she continued writing, producing, directing and making costumes for many amateur stage productions, winning several awards. In the 1970s, two of her plays – Enchanted Shell (1976) and Strikers (1978) – were published, and the latter was awarded first prize in the Greater London Arts festival competition for original plays.
Joan began a new career in photographic modelling and character acting in the early 1970s. During the next two decades, she was photographed for many adverts and took small parts in TV shows such as The Two Ronnies and Only Fools and Horses. Her photo was plastered across the backs of many buses in London as one of the faces advertising the Freedom Pass.
A great dog lover, Joan was delighted to act in a couple of scenes in the Disney film 102 Dalmatians (2000) with Glenn Close. She also appeared briefly in two music videos, for the 1996 song Setting Sun by the Chemical Brothers featuring Noel Gallagher, and for Frontier Psychiatrist (2000) by the Avalanches. (Neither song was to her musical taste.)
As a lookalike model, Joan also enjoyed an additional career impersonating Queen Victoria in her widowhood, appearing at numerous grand openings and other events, talking to schoolchildren, and welcoming visitors to the Crystal Palace Museum. She read voraciously about Queen Victoria’s life in order to be able to deliver historical speeches and answer questions from memory. She never took payment for her performances at schools, preferring instead to receive donations of wool, which she knitted into children’s jumpers for Oxfam.
In 2001, Joan was invited to the National Railway Museum at York for a photoshoot in Queen Victoria’s last remaining royal carriage, which until then had been hermetically sealed for preservation. “It is difficult to describe my feelings as I saw the doors open,” she wrote. “I had plenty of time to look about me and remind myself I was sitting where the royal posterior used to be placed.”
She continued working until 2004.
Harold died in 1983. Joan is survived by their son, Nigel, and two granddaughters, my sister, Zoë, and me.
